What follows is a piece that I was commissioned to write for an education publication called The Grade. On submission they declared that the piece was, quote, “too hot” for publication. As I said to them, that response demonstrates the piece’s thesis perfectly.
Excellent post as usual. Your international comparisons look at means, what about variances? Does Finland, for example, with an exceptionally egalitarian and high quality system have lower outcome variance than the US? Also, if I'm remembering right, work by James Heckman and collaborators suggests that certain types of interventions do work well, such as working directly with parents to enrich home environments. Is this not the case?
I very much enjoyed your piece & agree that most interventions to improve Ed outcomes are targeting the wrong aspect of development. However, you imply that genes alone are responsible for variation in performance. This misses the interaction between children and environments. Such interactions have an exponential effect on things like stress and resource utilization. Any intervention that fails to consider the interacting nature of children and the environment they are in is likely to fail (as most of those you describe have done so). In health care research we talk relentlessly about the social determinants of health (sdoh) as these factor as much as 80% in health outcomes. I would be surprised if they didn’t have a similar effect on education outcomes.
I come from a family of educators, and we have all experienced the bad effects of optimism bias. My dad was a middle-school principal for decades, and his school had to hire two paraprofessionals whose main job was to change diapers for the profoundly disabled kids who attended the school. My dad was so frustrated by the district officials’ apparent belief that these kids would obtain any benefit whatsoever from a regular public school. My mom was a special-ed teacher whose job it was to help high school kids pass a basic literacy test in order to graduate. Every year she had around thirty students who were functionally illiterate. And in my own time as a teacher in an elite private high school, I knew that some kids, in spite of having every economic advantage as well as excellent teachers (if I do say so myself) would struggle with reading comprehension and essay writing.
The saddest aspect of optimism bias is that it is misplaced. Education reformers misguidedly believe that all children can achieve in narrowly-defined academic topics--literature, math, science, expository writing--when if only they were to broaden their understanding of ability and achievement, schools could serve all kids and offer instruction in all areas where kids have talent.
I am old enough to have gone to public school in the days of academic tracking, when schools not only adapted academic classes to students’ intrinsic abilities, but also offered classes in shop and home economics and allowed kids to leave campus for apprenticeships, vocational education, and part-time jobs. These students enjoyed being able to learn about topics where they had interest and talent, and it is not bigoted want to offer students these opportunities now.
You write: “that the most natural and simplest explanation for this tendency is that there is such a thing as individual academic potential; and that the most likely source of this individual academic potential is genes.”
It’s super weird to me (someone who has no investment in or background in educational policy) how we all know genes matter... except for the magical exception that genes don’t effect academic ability. I can’t imagine any other explanation for this total denial of obvious reality except for personal and professional incentives to pretend otherwise.
Half of your argument is that there is a bell-shaped curve in human educational performance, and that even if you could shift the curve to the right a bit, the individuals in the distribution would not change their relative position. (This is an argument we all accept in other arenas of performance when we talk about “talent” like music or athletics.). The other half of the argument is harder to accept: due to so many societal/structural factors, we have not and cannot really even shift the curve to the right a little. You have let the data argue that persuasively but it is sad.
I have a theory of your theory: The only reason we need this optimism bias is to save us from seeing what’s in front of us: In a contemporary American economic system in which job security (and upward, if not merely stable socioeconomic mobility) depends on having collegiate degree(s), there is a predictable proportion of students for which these academic achievements are unattainable, and so many labor-intensive manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to other countries — there will therefore predictably be a class of Americans for which dignified, stable, non-intellectual job security does not exist. Optimism bias in education is simply a recasting of the American “bootstraps” mentality, rebranded in an era in which academic tickets to the economy are the only way in!
I am far from an expert, but I seem to recall decades of educational nostrums, all operating on premise that all we gotta do is fix this and our schools will work again.
I have always thought that education begins with us, starting with our earliest days. Schooling can polish and focus that, but it can't pour in insight like programming an AI computer.
Did not Frank Zappa teach the masses:
"Go to college if you want to to get laid.
Go to the library if you want to to get an education."
Perhaps not. But your piece says that it would be possible to erase the racial achievement gap in the US with social welfare policies so something makes a difference, even if it’s not school based.
I think excelling in the classroom is an end unto itself and predictive of absolutely nothing moving forward. It doesn't predict how much money you will make, how happy you will be, what kind of parent you will be, what kind of employee you will be, anything.
This all goes back to the obsession with college in this country. Get the best grades, the highest SAT scores so you can go to a great college and get a good job working for some great company. The end result of that is this elite vs working class divide that has all of us at each other's throats in this country.
I believe we need to go back to identifying skill sets and start leaning into it at a much earlier age. Call me an antique but I think there is self fulfillment in being good at something. It is a much shorter road going from good to great than it is going from bad to great.
It takes all kinds of people to make the world go round. When your toilet is overflowing or your car breaks down on the side of the road, the person who can make that problem go away is pretty damn important in that moment and you probably don't give a shit about what his English score was on the SAT.
Could it be that the reason the optimism bias is so hard to overcome is that until very recently (in historical terms), lots of students WERE dismissed and ignored as "slow." Are education policy people overcorrecting for the errors of their grandparents?
There WAS a lot of human potential that was not harnessed..and whether or not you got an opportunity to go to school was highly dependent on where you lived and whether your parents could afford to feed you while you were going to school. Of my four grandparents, two did not have any formal education past the eighth grade, but all four were highly intelligent, widely read, and worked like demons to make sure their kids could go to college. In the 1970's when I was in high school, recalcitrant but very bright kids like me were often shunted into voc-tech rather than college because it was still seen as a perfectly good outcome--college wasn't seen as the one successful outcome because you could still be a contributing more-or-less middle class person with a high school education.
I am violently in agreement that there is a range of cognitive abilities from very low to very high. The "system," which I think of as the "school to career" pipeline--the idea that society will invest in a kid so that the kid will end up paying taxes and not go around breaking shit---has evolved over time. The bell curve has shifted rightward. Where a generation ago you could have a modestly comfortable life without the mental horsepower to pass high school algebra, now you can't graduate until you can get through that cognitive gateway. There was a huge freakout in the 1980's about our "failing schools" and things pivoted rather quickly from the lax standards in place when I graduated high school and what my younger stepsisters had to do. Math requirements went from 2 years to 4 years. Foreign language went from zero to two years. More academic credit requirements crowded out things like P.E, shop, and music. Things have only ratcheted up since then, and more and more kids are struggling since they are being asked to do work that they simply can't do--it's like being told to run five miles in order to graduate when you can barely huff around the track.
Maybe it's time to pivot and start freaking out about other things rather than smarts---as of last year, 78% of 18 year olds didn't meet the standard for military service due to obesity, drug use, or mental health conditions. Schools have ignored the whole person for a generation and have been fixated on academics. Now we have a bunch of fat miserable kids. Get them outside and moving around and start measuring progress on physical competence. Can they ride a bike? Can they sew on a button? Can they cook a meal? Can they run a mile without stopping? Adolescents need to develop competence in order to evolve into healthy adults. The role of public schools is to encourage that development so that our society doesn't end up with too many people going around breaking shit.
As someone who is a big fan of The Nurture Assumption, I've always wondered if educational reforms that help control for peer effects could help. I mean, a lot of how students act is based upon the acculturation from older students, which can be maladaptive academically. What happens when a new school is set up de novo with a kindergarten, adding grades only as the first cohort ages up? Similarly, is there any comprehensive difference in performance between boarding schools and regular schools, once SES is accounted for? I could see this as a possibility given it limits exposure to any peer groups outside of school.
I don’t really understand how people think about IQ. 7 million Americans have an IQ below 70 which qualifies them for SSI as they are considered intellectually disabled. 45 million Americans have an IQ below 85 and are thus unable to join the military. What do people think life is like for someone with an IQ of 77?
I saw a comment from an educator working with a child who was struggling mightily with academics and they were certain this meant the education system had failed them. My thought was why would the possibility that they have very low ability not be considered?
Excellent post as usual. Your international comparisons look at means, what about variances? Does Finland, for example, with an exceptionally egalitarian and high quality system have lower outcome variance than the US? Also, if I'm remembering right, work by James Heckman and collaborators suggests that certain types of interventions do work well, such as working directly with parents to enrich home environments. Is this not the case?
Very interesting. If not money or poverty or pedagogy, what does explain the large disparities in academic performance across countries?
I very much enjoyed your piece & agree that most interventions to improve Ed outcomes are targeting the wrong aspect of development. However, you imply that genes alone are responsible for variation in performance. This misses the interaction between children and environments. Such interactions have an exponential effect on things like stress and resource utilization. Any intervention that fails to consider the interacting nature of children and the environment they are in is likely to fail (as most of those you describe have done so). In health care research we talk relentlessly about the social determinants of health (sdoh) as these factor as much as 80% in health outcomes. I would be surprised if they didn’t have a similar effect on education outcomes.
I come from a family of educators, and we have all experienced the bad effects of optimism bias. My dad was a middle-school principal for decades, and his school had to hire two paraprofessionals whose main job was to change diapers for the profoundly disabled kids who attended the school. My dad was so frustrated by the district officials’ apparent belief that these kids would obtain any benefit whatsoever from a regular public school. My mom was a special-ed teacher whose job it was to help high school kids pass a basic literacy test in order to graduate. Every year she had around thirty students who were functionally illiterate. And in my own time as a teacher in an elite private high school, I knew that some kids, in spite of having every economic advantage as well as excellent teachers (if I do say so myself) would struggle with reading comprehension and essay writing.
The saddest aspect of optimism bias is that it is misplaced. Education reformers misguidedly believe that all children can achieve in narrowly-defined academic topics--literature, math, science, expository writing--when if only they were to broaden their understanding of ability and achievement, schools could serve all kids and offer instruction in all areas where kids have talent.
I am old enough to have gone to public school in the days of academic tracking, when schools not only adapted academic classes to students’ intrinsic abilities, but also offered classes in shop and home economics and allowed kids to leave campus for apprenticeships, vocational education, and part-time jobs. These students enjoyed being able to learn about topics where they had interest and talent, and it is not bigoted want to offer students these opportunities now.
You write: “that the most natural and simplest explanation for this tendency is that there is such a thing as individual academic potential; and that the most likely source of this individual academic potential is genes.”
It’s super weird to me (someone who has no investment in or background in educational policy) how we all know genes matter... except for the magical exception that genes don’t effect academic ability. I can’t imagine any other explanation for this total denial of obvious reality except for personal and professional incentives to pretend otherwise.
Thanks for being honest about it Freddie.
Half of your argument is that there is a bell-shaped curve in human educational performance, and that even if you could shift the curve to the right a bit, the individuals in the distribution would not change their relative position. (This is an argument we all accept in other arenas of performance when we talk about “talent” like music or athletics.). The other half of the argument is harder to accept: due to so many societal/structural factors, we have not and cannot really even shift the curve to the right a little. You have let the data argue that persuasively but it is sad.
I have a theory of your theory: The only reason we need this optimism bias is to save us from seeing what’s in front of us: In a contemporary American economic system in which job security (and upward, if not merely stable socioeconomic mobility) depends on having collegiate degree(s), there is a predictable proportion of students for which these academic achievements are unattainable, and so many labor-intensive manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to other countries — there will therefore predictably be a class of Americans for which dignified, stable, non-intellectual job security does not exist. Optimism bias in education is simply a recasting of the American “bootstraps” mentality, rebranded in an era in which academic tickets to the economy are the only way in!
I am far from an expert, but I seem to recall decades of educational nostrums, all operating on premise that all we gotta do is fix this and our schools will work again.
I have always thought that education begins with us, starting with our earliest days. Schooling can polish and focus that, but it can't pour in insight like programming an AI computer.
Did not Frank Zappa teach the masses:
"Go to college if you want to to get laid.
Go to the library if you want to to get an education."
Perhaps not. But your piece says that it would be possible to erase the racial achievement gap in the US with social welfare policies so something makes a difference, even if it’s not school based.
Is your book in (or coming to) paperback? I can only see hardback on Book Depository and Amazon.
I think excelling in the classroom is an end unto itself and predictive of absolutely nothing moving forward. It doesn't predict how much money you will make, how happy you will be, what kind of parent you will be, what kind of employee you will be, anything.
This all goes back to the obsession with college in this country. Get the best grades, the highest SAT scores so you can go to a great college and get a good job working for some great company. The end result of that is this elite vs working class divide that has all of us at each other's throats in this country.
I believe we need to go back to identifying skill sets and start leaning into it at a much earlier age. Call me an antique but I think there is self fulfillment in being good at something. It is a much shorter road going from good to great than it is going from bad to great.
It takes all kinds of people to make the world go round. When your toilet is overflowing or your car breaks down on the side of the road, the person who can make that problem go away is pretty damn important in that moment and you probably don't give a shit about what his English score was on the SAT.
Could it be that the reason the optimism bias is so hard to overcome is that until very recently (in historical terms), lots of students WERE dismissed and ignored as "slow." Are education policy people overcorrecting for the errors of their grandparents?
There WAS a lot of human potential that was not harnessed..and whether or not you got an opportunity to go to school was highly dependent on where you lived and whether your parents could afford to feed you while you were going to school. Of my four grandparents, two did not have any formal education past the eighth grade, but all four were highly intelligent, widely read, and worked like demons to make sure their kids could go to college. In the 1970's when I was in high school, recalcitrant but very bright kids like me were often shunted into voc-tech rather than college because it was still seen as a perfectly good outcome--college wasn't seen as the one successful outcome because you could still be a contributing more-or-less middle class person with a high school education.
I am violently in agreement that there is a range of cognitive abilities from very low to very high. The "system," which I think of as the "school to career" pipeline--the idea that society will invest in a kid so that the kid will end up paying taxes and not go around breaking shit---has evolved over time. The bell curve has shifted rightward. Where a generation ago you could have a modestly comfortable life without the mental horsepower to pass high school algebra, now you can't graduate until you can get through that cognitive gateway. There was a huge freakout in the 1980's about our "failing schools" and things pivoted rather quickly from the lax standards in place when I graduated high school and what my younger stepsisters had to do. Math requirements went from 2 years to 4 years. Foreign language went from zero to two years. More academic credit requirements crowded out things like P.E, shop, and music. Things have only ratcheted up since then, and more and more kids are struggling since they are being asked to do work that they simply can't do--it's like being told to run five miles in order to graduate when you can barely huff around the track.
Maybe it's time to pivot and start freaking out about other things rather than smarts---as of last year, 78% of 18 year olds didn't meet the standard for military service due to obesity, drug use, or mental health conditions. Schools have ignored the whole person for a generation and have been fixated on academics. Now we have a bunch of fat miserable kids. Get them outside and moving around and start measuring progress on physical competence. Can they ride a bike? Can they sew on a button? Can they cook a meal? Can they run a mile without stopping? Adolescents need to develop competence in order to evolve into healthy adults. The role of public schools is to encourage that development so that our society doesn't end up with too many people going around breaking shit.
As someone who is a big fan of The Nurture Assumption, I've always wondered if educational reforms that help control for peer effects could help. I mean, a lot of how students act is based upon the acculturation from older students, which can be maladaptive academically. What happens when a new school is set up de novo with a kindergarten, adding grades only as the first cohort ages up? Similarly, is there any comprehensive difference in performance between boarding schools and regular schools, once SES is accounted for? I could see this as a possibility given it limits exposure to any peer groups outside of school.
I don’t really understand how people think about IQ. 7 million Americans have an IQ below 70 which qualifies them for SSI as they are considered intellectually disabled. 45 million Americans have an IQ below 85 and are thus unable to join the military. What do people think life is like for someone with an IQ of 77?
I saw a comment from an educator working with a child who was struggling mightily with academics and they were certain this meant the education system had failed them. My thought was why would the possibility that they have very low ability not be considered?